The monopoly strategy behind the Google/Microsoft mobile patent wars

- First of all, I have no interest in or patience for Ayn Rand. I don't know any economists who take her remotely seriously. All of the American economists I know are on the left politically. So are most of the non-American economists I know. There are, of course, prominent exceptions to the rule.

- I don't know why we are accused of having no theory of prices? I teach that in week 2 of my principles of microeconomics class. I don't teach inflation b/c I don't teach macro, but they do have theories.

- We don't assume people have perfect information, with the possible exception of using it as a very simple benchmark case on our way to something more complicated and realistic. Incomplete/imperfect information has been a central feature of all theoretical and empirical work in the profession for more than 40 years now.

- He shares a post about concentration in meatpacking. I agree that we have allowed many markets to become too concentrated, including meatpacking! I am in favor of stronger antitrust enforcement! My entire sub-field is empirical studies of imperfectly competitive industries.

- Skipping several tweets (there is really too much here to argue with every point...) we have talked about the CORE textbook in my department. Most of us put it on our syllabi. It is free, after all. As a comment on Doctorow's take: every Principles textbook mentions the environment because every Principles textbook talks about externalities. I spend a week on the subject.

Again, I confirm my impression that he doesn't know anything about economics or competition policy, but studying it more seriously would be to his benefit, especially in commenting on technology and regulation issues.

They buy a patent which looks good, i.e. applies broadly, hasn't been litigated unsuccessfully, has a few more years to run, ideally has been tested by an unsuccessful IPR. The whole goal is to make back the investment in a few years. Contrary to what someone said, there is not an infinite supply of those.

Then they pick out easy targets to sue, i.e. companies which just settle without much fuss. Those settlements don't have to be for large amounts, and typically are not.

I should correct the word "sue." Often there is no lawsuit. If a defendant is formally notified that they might be sued, they can seek a Declarative Judgment (DJ) in a friendly venue, which affirms that they're not infringing. The troll does not want to be DJ'ed. So they just threaten without really threatening ("hey, you might want to take a look at this patent!").

Those easy targets build up a war chest, which the troll then uses to go after the bigger and harder targets. These are companies that will fight back, often with an IPR.

So the moral is: make yourself a hard target. Never roll over for those people.

"What the market will bear." is a nonanswer to them even though it is accurate because reality is messy with human psychology more so.

Of course from mainstream economics perspective their concepts of value and exploitation are between fallacious (universal global value because labor is assumed as the basis) to pants-on-head levels of crazy (the idea that a fair trasaction becomes unfair when the buyer is able to reap later profit).

It is within a space of possibilities but a sustained lack of evidence decreases the probability of it being so as numbers increase. It is possible that a given person drove drunk without being caught. But if they drove drunk everyday throughout many different towns and villages? Less likely.

In THEORY, when the fragment is (semantically?) significant, the site could dynamically alter the link rel="canonical" value to include the fragment such that you could check whether to keep it or not, but in practice I think that canonical links are intended for web crawler deduplication and so nearly always strip fragments off.